How We Lead Change at Ellevated Outcomes

Hello there! This week is a continuation of last week’s introduction to Leading Change. This is super-nerdy, but one of my favorite things in life is taking academic or philosophical concepts and figuring out how to apply them IRL. So although the principles in this book were originally intended for corporations, we’ve tweaked them to have impact for our small business clients. So here’s how we lead change at Ellevated Outcomes.

Leading Change is an eight-stage process. To be fair to John Kotter, he clearly and repeatedly says not to skip any stages. But here, I’m going to share our riffs on the five most impactful steps in our client work, as we help our clients change their businesses and lives.

Starting with: the mini-cliffhanger I left you with last week…

1. Establish a Sense of Urgency

Last week, I dropped off at the “most important question for prospects to pass through our quote gate.” So I won’t bury the lead; here it is:

On a scale from 1-10 (no 7!), how much headspace is your business taking up?

In other words, how much pain are you in?

This isn’t to be mean or take advantage of anyone. In fact, quite the opposite. It’s to weed out prospects who don’t have urgent enough issues to solve. Because we know that if they don’t feel a sense of urgency, they’re not going to really be invested in making the changes we advise.

It’s not good or bad, it’s simply psychologically true! So if someone isn’t an 8, 9, or 10 on that scale, they’re not going to find value in what we do. And we have an honest conversation upfront to tell them that it’s probably not time to move forward together yet.

2. Develop a Vision & Strategy

Our kickoff session with a client is always composed of what we call the “Future Framework.” We ask the client a lot of questions to extract their business’s mission, vision, values, and goals (business and personal).

We need to understand who they are, how they walk through the world, and where they want to go, to craft them a customized strategy to get there. After all, if they’re not compelled by their own vision, they’re not going to do the work required to change.

3. Generate Short-Term Wins

Our clients’ favorite – especially with Brits (she says with sarcasm, hehe). Beginning in meeting #2, we always kick off by asking “What are your quick wins since our last meeting?” Before we get to know each other, the question tends to receive confused looks and some hemming and hawing. But eventually, everyone comes around – even the non-Americans!

Because we’re doing deep, foundation-shifting work, the meaningful outcomes take time. Our average year one return on investment is 300%, but that doesn’t happen overnight! Quick wins keep us all energized and appreciative that we are moving forward; and things are getting better, one step at a time.

4. Consolidate Gains

As you may know from our FAQs, we work with clients for a minimum of one year. We don’t pretend like anything we do is a quick fix; it’s totally not. In fact, sometimes our clients will tease us, “I don’t have many quick wins this week, but can I tell you about my long win?” Ha – touché!

So we break that year into two, six month increments. After the first six months, we pause together to look back at the original goals to see which of them we’ve accomplished and how we’re tracking to the others. This pause helps us all step back and see the larger picture, while getting a CEO-level view on how much work we’ve done, moving us toward the new vision.

5. Anchor New Approaches in the Culture

As mentioned above, we divide our year of work into two, six-month phases. We often describe the first six months as the “heavy lifting.” Then, the second six months is about continued implementation; and testing, learning, and refining. This is so, so, sooooooo important, really for two reasons.

(1) Things rarely work perfectly the first time. There’s the “classroom” theory, and then there’s… real life. We’re absolutely honest with people about this. We know the business principles that work and for whom. But we’ll want to tweak them, to make sure that they are customized, natural, and beneficial for that specific business.

(2) In the first six months we make lots of changes to the business. In the second six months, we want to move to a place where the changes no longer feel new. We move from “here are the new things we’re doing” to “this is now how we do business.” It becomes operationalized, culturized, and woven into the fabric of that client’s business, from now on.


Remember, this is only the leadership and change management side of things; it’s not the business and technical stuff at all! But because we care so much about getting small businesses outcomes, we must put care into the leadership and how. But truly, we must give the credit to our clients on this one. As John Kotter says,

Transformation requires sacrifice, dedication, and creativity.

And that is all them, my friends.